In Soviet Russia, science [something] you!

A few posts back, Hopefully Anonymous wrote “Although the USSR was counterintuitively shitty at a range of things where better use of markets and decentralized autonomy would’ve helped (consumer manufacturing, etc.) they seem to me to have been scientifically productive well beyond the space program. It’s not all Lysenko, it seems to me -but my intuition would probably benefit a lot from more knowledge about USSR history during this period.”

Paul Johnson thought otherwise, at least during the tail end of Stalin’s rule. In “Modern Times” he wrote the following:
From 1948 on, theoretical physics, cosmology, chemistry, genetics, medicine, psychology and cybernetics were all systematically raked over. Relativity theory was condemned, not (as in Nazi Germany) because Einstein was a Jew but for equally irrelevant reasons: Marx had said the universe was infinite, and Einstein had got some ideas from Mach, who had been proscribed by Lenin. […] Thousands of intellectuals lost their jobs. Thousands more went into the camps. Their places were taken by creatures still more pliable, cranks and frauds. Soviet biology fell into the hands of the fanatical eccentric T. D. Lysenko […] Scientific genetics was savaged as a ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’, ‘anti-Marxist’, leading to ‘sabotage’ of the Soviet economy: those who practised it had their laboratories closed down. Glorying in the reign of terror was another agricultural quack, V. R. Williams. In medicine, a woman called O. B. Lepeshinskaya preached that old age could be postponed by bicarbonate of soda enemas – an idea that briefly appealed to Stalin. In linguistics, N. Y. Marr argued that all human speech could be reduced to four basic elements: sal, ber, yon and rosh.

I’d rather not just take Johnson’s word, so if anyone has links on Soviet science, tell us about them in the comments.

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13 Responses to “In Soviet Russia, science [something] you!”

It is said that in the Soviet Union smart people were much more likely to become scientists and engineers than in the US, because there were no lucrative business careers to pursue. Here’s a 1979 article with some relevant statistics.

Science certainly stagnated under Stalin. Even under Stalin’s successors, there seemed to be an unusually large number of cranks and buffoons in the scientific mix, along with quite a few genuine scientists. Quantitative measurement of such things as scientific creativity is next to impossible, but given the statistics available, I’d say that the USSR significantly underperformed in the scientific arena, despite some exceptional accomplishments is high-pressure physics, human performance, etc.

One anecdote… Detection of blood type was behind Western standards and Russia’s most infamous serial killer (Andrei Chikatilo) wasn’t able to be linked to his own semen from previous crime scenes, and thus was only tried for theft after being arrested in 1984 as a suspect for the murders he committed. He spent three months in prison, and was set free to continue killing until his re-arrest in 1990. Western blood tests at the time used a greater number of markers and the same error would not have been made.

Scientists have long been more comfortable with the idea of a universe infinite in time and space — the big bang theory was initially suspect, as an attempt to reintroduce Christian ideas of a creation. In the West, weight of evidence was enough to overcome resistance to the big bang.

I have a book called “The Big Bang Never Happened”, 1992 by Eric Lerner. Lerner is an American, but I think the science he is writing about is mostly Russian.

Now I look at it, it seems the science is from Hannes Alfven who was Swedish, though Lerner also credits Ilya Prigogine. Who was a refugee from the Soviets.

So this is a totally irrelevant comment. Sorry. I’m posting it anyway, because to skip it would be misleading in statistical terms, like suppressing negative results — here’s some bad science that I thought was Soviet, but actually isn’t. (At least I’m assuming it’s probably bad, I’m not actually competent to make that judgement myself).

I’m not immediately familiar with other references to the condition of science in the Soviet Union, but Ted Anton’s book “Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu” (Evanston, Ill., 1996: Northwestern University Press) paints a curious picture of the distortions of academic study in the Soviet satellite state of Roumania. Total censorship and total control of everyday life by the secret police are not conducive to scholarship.

Remember the longstanding Russian habit of claiming to have “invented it first,” it being whatever technology happened at the moment to be in the public eye? Ceausescu took this to an extreme, instituting the study of “protochronism,” a discipline devoted to demonstrating that Roumanians essentially invented civilization first.

Whatever purported advantages might be claimed for centralization and state funding of the sciences behind the Iron Curtain appear to have been outweighed by the extent to which scholarship was subordinated to ideology and to the whims of a dictator, be he Stalin or Ceausescu. The support of pseudo-science appears to be one of the hallmarks of totalitarianism. Furthermore, scholarship depends greatly on free communication and ease of access to information. These are not compatible with the nationwide registration of typewriters (as in Roumania), restrictions on access to photocopying machines (as in Soviet Russia), or censorship of the Internet (as in China, Iran,etc.).

The Soviets idealized engineers rather than scientists. They did some pretty amazing engineering, such as beating us into space, unmanned and manned, despite the general crumminess of everything in the Soviet Union. JFK had to invent the Moon Race to give America a chance to catch up.

And now, when you think about it, the most useful of the 3 great steps into space was the Soviet’s Sputnik, not Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong. Unmanned satellites for GPS and the like are great. Manned space travel … eh …